Please Do NOT Revise Your Tone

As some of you already know, I am also one of the bloggers at NewAPPS.  I’m re-posting here a piece co-authored by Edward Kazaian and I that appeared this past Tuesday on NewAPPS.  It’s generated a lot of conversation so far, and I’ll have a post forthcoming soon on my take on that conversation.

What follows is the original post, exactly as it appeared on NewAPPS.  The responses by commenters were so immediate and overwhelming that NewAPPS had to open a second (supplemental) discussion thread here.  Both Ed and I, for the most part, were largely uninvolved in the original thread, though we’ve committed to participating in the supplemental thread. 

Please do NOT revise your tone
[Leigh M. Johnson and Edward Kazarian]

We trust it won’t come as a surprise to
NewAPPS readers that the reputation of professional Philosophy has been
taking a well-deserved beating in the public sphere.  The really bad press started two years ago with the Vincent Hendricks scandal, gained momentum a year later with the Colin McGinn scandal, and has unleashed its full fury this year with the triplet of scandals at the University of Colorado-Boulder, Northwestern University and Oxford University. 
Given the severity—and, in some cases, alleged criminality—of the
behaviors reported in these scandals, what IS surprising to us is the
turn that recent intra-disciplinary conversations about them has taken. 
As two non-tenured professional philosophers, we’re particularly
concerned with the new enthusiasm for policing “collegiality”
that seems to be emerging in and from these conversations, which in
almost every case promotes a norm that we fear only serves to make the
vulnerable among us even more vulnerable.

An exemplary instance of how “collegiality” standards can backfire is
found in Brian Leiter’s quasi-authoritative “please revise your tone”
comment (and more general attitudinal disposition) in this discussion on the Feminist Philosophers blog, followed by his longer a fortiori post  (which he removed from his blog within hours, but which has been preserved here)
on the “increasingly ugly cyber-dynamics” of conversations about sexual
harassment in the profession. (For the record, we want to note that the
sexual harassment problems in our profession are far uglier
than the conversational cyber-dynamics in our profession, though it’s
really a lose-lose in that determination.)  It is important to take note
of the dynamics on display in these threads, which demonstrate more
than a little bit of our “climate” problem. Leiter invoked “tone” in
reprimanding critics of his position on the issues under discussion and
he directed his opprobrium at, among others, a graduate student
speaking to the vulnerability she and many of her colleagues feel in a
profession with an increasingly well-documented hostile climate for
women. Many of the other commenters in the thread, including the post’s
author, argued explicitly against attempts to police matters of tone
(see comments 10 and 16).

To be precise, we’re troubled that insistences on a certain set of
normative standards for “collegiality” are regularly being forwarded on behalf of people like us—i.e.,
colleagues from underrepresented groups in the profession, those with
provisional employment, and/or those whose status as stakeholders in the
profession is undervalued—presumably in the interest of making the
space of professional (philosophical) disagreement friendlier and
“safer” for us.  What seems to go largely unacknowledged, if not
intentionally ignored, is the manner in which the right to police norms
of professional collegiality is a privilege that attends only
those for whom running afoul of those standards has no real
consequences.  And so, to those attempting to police these standards of
collgiality, we want to say: Thanks, but no thanks.

We understand that our objections herein may seem counter-intuitive
to many of our colleagues. Collegiality is, after all, widely perceived
to be one of the core academic virtues, something to be valued and
cultivated as a basic structuring element in our community, perhaps even
one of the necessary conditions for the possibility of an academic
community.  In order to make room for the intellectual space required
for ‘dissent,’ the traditional understanding of collegiality goes, we’re
obliged to be (or at the very least, behave like) ‘friends.’

Our contention, however, is that this requirement is excessively
regulative in a way that almost inevitably leads to exclusionary
results. The rule of ‘collegiality” qua smooth conforming
social behavior, “fitting in” in a way that doesn’t ruffle feathers, is
the sort of requirement that only works, practically speaking, in very
homogenous communities. If we may be permitted an analogy, collegiality
is like ‘togetherness’ as analyzed by Jane Jacobs in Death and Life of Great American Cities. 
There, Jacobs is concerned with how cities can work as communities of
“strangers” (she emphasizes that frequently encountering strangers is an
inevitable fact of city life, just as it is in our profession), and
with how the largely anonymous interactions of sidewalk life might
potentially perform a number of positive essential functions, e.g.,
providing for general safety and contact between people in a
neighborhood.  Her discussion of togetherness arises with regard to how
otherwise-rare ‘contact’ is handled in the absence of a constant circulation of people on the street, emphasizing that lack of contact
is the most frequent outcome in cities.  (To wit, Jacobs’ concerns
about the lack of “contact” in city-life reflect the very same concerns
that plague professional Philosophy now, namely, that we “philosophers”
are joined together in a community only by virtue of a minimal,
almost-entirely “professional,”  and increasingly exclusively digital,
that is to say, tangential and, at best, entirely impersonal
connection.)  But it is Jacobs’ description of the consequences of
opting for “togetherness,” in the absence of something that might
genuinely constitute togetherness, that are of interest to us here.

Specifically, we’re concerned that Jacobs’ claim that “where people
do share much, they become exceedingly choosy as to who their neighbors
are, or with whom they associate at all,” has come to unfortunately
dominate the determination of collegiality within and among professional
philosophers.  Jacobs’ analysis elucidates, saliently in our view, that
this implicit and unavoidable “choosiness” among and between
self-appointed protectors of a community’s “togetherness” makes real
diversity not only unwelcome, but nearly impossible to support.  In a
passage that is highly resonant with much of the agonizing about ‘fit’
that goes into hiring decisions, as well as the difficulty that many
departments—not to mention our discipline as a whole—have with retaining
a broadly diverse group of students and faculty, she writes:

People who do not fit happily into such colonies eventually get out,
and in time managements become sophisticated in knowing who among
applicants will fit in. Along with basic similarities of standards,
values and backgrounds, the arrangement seems to demand a formidable
amount of forbearance and tact…
City residential planning that depends, for contact among neighbors,
on personal sharing of this sort, and    that cultivates it, often does
work well socially, if rather narrowly, for self-selected upper-middle-class    people.
It solves easy problems for an easy kind of population. So far as I
have been able to discover, it    fails to work, however, even on its
own terms, with any other kind of population (65).

As an ideal, what a certain formulation of “collegiality”—dominant in
recent discussions and exemplified by Brian Leiter’s “please revise
your tone” comment at FP—relies upon is an abstract notion of ‘collegiality” that, when implemented among real professional philosophers, requires a common manner, disposition or set of behaviors, even across many important social differences. As a regulative ideal, we do not object to that notion of collegiality.  What we do object to is the mandating of it—because we recognize that, in practice, what is being mandated can only be behaviors that mimic
“togetherness” where such togetherness is manifestly not the case. 
Members of traditionally privileged groups in academia (tenured, white,
straight, cis men chief among them) might experience collegiality as the
glue that allows them to “get into it” with one another at a paper
presentation, in a department meeting, in print or in the various
digital versions of print, and then subsequently wash away any
potentially lingering disagreement over a few beers. But members of
out-groups do not share in the easy sociality of ‘the guys,’ nor do they
share in the personal or professional safety that makes that easy
sociality possible. 

What is or is not permitted as acceptable speech or behavior, what is
or is not viewed as “anti-social,” “un-professional” or
“un-collegial”—that is to say, what strikes the ears of community
members as resonating with an inappropriate “tone”—will always be
defined and policed according to the norms of that group’s social
interchange, norms that are determined by those to whom such norms are
the most advantageous. Those for whom such norms of collegiality do not
render benefits will find, as a matter of course, the professional
insistence on “collegiality” exponentially more demanding. Indeed, as
long as this particular formulation of collegiality remains a
professional standard, underrepresented groups will find themselves
locked into the false choice between ineffectively participating in
hostile spaces (and being called out for their non-allegiance to the
rules of collegiality) or, what is often worse, not participating (and
consequently being seen as ‘aloof,’ ‘disengaged,’ ‘unprofessional’ or
whatever other code for “antisocial” one wishes to cite). The
predictable result of this dynamic is just what the comparison with
Jacobs’ ‘togetherness’ would lead us to expect, namely, professional
Philosophy will continue, as it has for millennia under the guise of
good-faith efforts to prevent the same, to drive-out or force-out
marginalized and underrepresented groups from the community/conversation
in disproportionate numbers.

Some might object that collegiality, these days, is a far less robust
standard than we are claiming, that it is really no more than an
insistence on some variation of “civility,” a virtue with which it is
grouped in the APA Committee for the Status of Women’s Report on the situation at UC-Boulder,
for example.  That Site Visit Committee, regrettably charged with
offering up an analysis of and practical fixes for what was an
all-too-common and fundamentally structural problem, also opted
to reinforce (in our view, unfortunately) the “collegiality” norms with
which we want to take issue here.   Insisting on “family-friendly”
conditions for the possibility of professional interaction, as the
UC-Boulder Site Committee’s Report does, may be (at least in
UC-Boulder’s case) a marginal improvement on the current conditions the
Site Visit Committee was charged with diagnosing, but their diagnosis
was not leveled without its own costs, not the least of which is that
“family-friendly” is not the measure by which every professional
philosopher does (or ought to) judge standards of collegiality.

What is more, even if “collegiality” is interpreted more narrowly and
held to bear simply on norms of professional (real, print or digital)
conversation, our professional norms of collegiality still tend to stack
the deck against anyone expressing a dissenting view.  And, let’s all
be honest, what professional Philosophy needs most now, ante omnia,
is a norm that welcomes without prejudice the stranger.  Our
professional norms for collegiality are typically much harder to satisfy
in terms that everyone (especially the target of the “un-collegial”
criticism) will agree are collegial. This is especially true, as
evidenced in recent conversations by Leiter et al, given how
likely it is that our colleagues will take claims that they are being
insufficiently sensitive to diversity issues as personal attacks or
claim that their critics aren’t being ‘collegial’ (or, as long as
collegiality is around as a professional standard, ‘unprofessional’),
thus neatly diverting responsibility away from themselves and back onto
the person who objected in the first place.

Leiter threw his
institutional weight and influence around to attack junior colleagues
(“Current Student” and Rachel McKinnon, particularly) by suggesting that
they were professionally unsuitable to engage in conversation; he
employed the age-old rhetorical strategy of discounting women’s voices
by appealing to female hysteria;
he insisted that his critics “please revise [their] tone” when he was
being called to account for his mendacity; he offered up a left-handed
“apology” for his misbehavior by endorsing a bona fide
race-baiting analogy to “lynch mobs,” and he did all of this under the
guise of calling for justice, fairness and collegiality.  Taken
together, this strikes us as a remarkable example of how the “problems”
with collegiality, as it is currntly understood and enforcedd by the
dominant colleagues in our field, are all too frequently manufactured by them.
To wit, we argue that the structural problems with collegiality
standards (and other similar standards, like civility, friendliness,
appropriateness, etc.) may be reason enough not to support the unreflective policing of such regulative criteria as those suggested in the Petition to the APA for a “Professional Code of Conduct for Philosophers.”

To summarize our objections, we worry that these standards will: 1)
impose a disproportionate burden of changing their behavior to “fit in”
on those who are members of out- (that is, underrepresented or minority)
groups within the profession; 2) likely be applied disproportionately
against those expressing dissenting views or criticizing colleagues for
lapses in judgment or perception; and 3) tend to reinforce or provide
opportunities to reiterate the structures of privilege and exclusion
already operating within the profession.

No one wants to work in a climate of hostility or incivility, of
course, least of all those of us for whom such a climate is the most
disadvantageous.  We acknowledge that some behaviors can be, ought to
be, and in fact are already legislated by extant (college,
university and federal) codes of conduct.  Hearts and minds, on the
other hand, ought not and cannot be legislated. It is at the level of
hearts and minds that our (professional philosophers’) real problem
lies.  Before we sign on to any program that mandates certain
attitudinal dispositions, we ought to think seriously about the extent
to which those initiatives in fact work to further discredit and
marginalize the very voices they are intended to protect.